And that's why he helped bring an end to conscription!

I didn't see anything about tax withholding in episode 1. Decent trolling tho

Only thing he proposes tax wise in the series is the negative income tax.

I disagree, unless you consider Steelhouse a decent troll.

Well if you are going to be an imperial power then having men sign up when needed for a conflict just won't do. No. You have to take money directly out of peoples' paychecks and use it to maintain an army that can impose the will of the rich people in this country upon the rest of the world.

I didn't even know "conscription" was ended. I think if we needed a draft we would have one. I don't think Friedman ended that. But it makes perfect sense that he would want to increase the size of the military to proportions that would make Satan wince.

Are you denying that Friedman was a principal architect of direct withholding? Of the gubment taking money straight out of your pocket without your permission?

Thread turned out awesome but not the way JTMe envisioned.

I've heard this but never read about it.

Cite it.

I have no idea. Not especially interested but others might be. You should start a thread imo.

When we had a thread trying to discuss a Karl Marx book we had all kinds of morons popping in "He knocked up his maid!" and other such nonsense in an attempt to derail. Lettuce have our thread imo

Whatever Friedman did outside of Free to Choose isn't really relevant here imo, but do cite.

in after LirvA

The Q&A is my favorite part. You learn a lot about what the world was like in 1980. Businesses operating without tarriffs and export subsidies? Unthinkable! Could you imagine what buying something on amazon would be like now? You'd have to select your item, figure shipping costs, then go to an additional step to figure out the national tarriffs depending on what nation you item was coming from and to.

The Q&A is absolute iron ballsy. How many docs would spend half the time making a point and the other half allowing people with opposing views to try to rebut?

I take for granted that anything factually incorrect, or even disputable, in this forum, will be quickly slammed. So I wouldn't put a fact out there unless I knew it to be true.

here is the first website that came up in google when I searched for "Milton Friedman withholding tax"

http://mises.org/daily/1797

here is a quote from the site:

"One of Friedman's most disastrous deeds was the important role he proudly played, during World War II in the Treasury Department, in foisting upon the suffering American public the system of the withholding tax. Before World War II, when income tax rates were far lower than now, there was no withholding system; everyone paid his annual bill in one lump sum, on March 15. It is obvious that under this system, the Internal Revenue Service could never hope to extract the entire annual sum, at current confiscatory rates, from the mass of the working population. The whole ghastly system would have happily broken down long before this. Only the Friedmanite withholding tax has permitted the government to use every employer as an unpaid tax collector, extracting the tax quietly and silently from each paycheck. In many ways, we have Milton Friedman to thank for the present monster Leviathan State in America."


I actually brought up this fact to an Econ grad student at U of C a few months ago and he didn't know about it either. I guess it's not one of the things that Milt wanted known about himself.

Milton Friedman is the godfather of the neocons. He wanted huge government, low wages, and suppression of human rights and he did everything he could to accomplish that.

But maybe I am getting off topic. I have no intention of watching a show that I am sure is so chalk full of BS that I won't be able to make it through without my eyes watering. I will let you conservative folks sit around and praise your hero and withhold my urge to tell you that in fact he is the nemesis of your values.